Napoleon in Egypt (2 page)

After the convoys from the separate ports had combined at sea and begun sailing for the eastern Mediterranean, the invasion armada swelled to cover almost five square miles, often reduced to traveling at the stately speed of one knot. Each afternoon all soldiers were paraded for inspection on the wide decks of the ships of the line. Military bands, their brass instruments glinting in the June sunlight, played stirring marches, while Napoleon watched from the bridge of the aptly named flagship
L’Orient
.

Napoleon cut a surprisingly unimpressive figure at this early stage in his career. He was thin as a rake and only five foot three inches tall.
¹
His gaunt, hard-eyed features, sullen in repose, were framed by long sideburns and lank shoulder-length hair. He was just twenty-eight years old. Yet this was very much a young man’s expedition, and some of his generals were even younger. Promotion came fast to men of ability in the revolutionary army, and their sallow-skinned young Corsican leader was an inspiration to both his officers and his men. He had already conducted a brilliant campaign in Italy, putting the powerful Austrians to flight and defeating the pope. The men of the Army of Italy were all too willing to follow their leader on this expedition into the unknown. To improve morale, Napoleon encouraged the soldiers parading on deck to sing patriotic songs, and each afternoon their voices would ring out across the sunlit Mediterranean, taken up by other soldiers from ship to ship through the fleet. Their favorites were “La Marseillaise” and the stirring “Chant du Départ” (“Song of Departure”):

Inspiring victory leads us through all barriers,

Liberty guides the footsteps of us warriors,

And from the north to the Midi we all

Hear the war-like trumpets call.

Tremble you enemies of France,

Our blood stirred with pride we advance.

The sovereign people are victorious,

All true patriots call on us:

A Frenchman must never ask why

For his country he must live or die!
²

Napoleon himself was a bad sailor, and in order to overcome seasickness he had ordered a special bed with casters attached to its legs to be installed in his cabin. This was intended to compensate for the rolling of the sea, and astonishingly it appears to have worked. Napoleon spent much of the voyage in bed, drawing up his plans for the invasion; this was his opportunity to emulate his hero, Alexander the Great. As he had confided to his secretary Bourrienne, prior to departure: “Europe is a molehill. . . . Everything here is worn out. My glory is slipping from my grasp, tiny Europe has not enough to offer. We must set off for the Orient; that is where all the greatest glory is to be achieved.”
³
Napoleon’s choice of words here was particularly revealing: he spoke of the Orient, not just Egypt. Although the Directory was under the impression that he intended to invade Egypt, Napoleon harbored dreams of following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, and marching all the way to India. When he had revealed to the Directory this extension to his plans, they had reluctantly assented to it, for the most part because they did not believe in it: this was merely the fantasy of a man intoxicated by ambition, and would prove impossible on the ground. In fact, as we shall see, Napoleon had already made detailed plans for the realization of this “Oriental fantasy.”

Even the approved, more realistic aims of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt were highly ambitious. His primary purpose was to liberate the Egyptians from the oppressive rule of the Mamelukes. But this was only the beginning. Along with his soldiers he had brought with him a team of 167 hand-picked “savants”; these consisted of the young intellectual cream of France, comprising many of the country’s finest mathematicians, scientists, artists, writers and inventors. The contemporary French historian Dominique Arago, with an ingenuousness that remains resonant to this day, characterized the aim of the invasion as being: “to offer a succoring hand to an unhappy people, to free them from the brutalizing yoke under which they have groaned for centuries, and finally to endow them without delay with all the benefits of European civilization.”
⁴
The Egyptians were to be freed from tyranny; they were to be shown the light of reason, provided with the advantages of popular government, and instructed in the latest scientific advances. (Napoleon had been insistent that the expedition should include one of the latest Montgolfier balloons, an impressive new technology which he felt sure would inspire wonder in the native population.)

Yet this was not to be an entirely one-sided undertaking. Napoleon felt that there was also much for the expedition to learn from Egypt itself. The Sphinx and the pyramids were already known to Europe, but travelers had returned with tales of huge statues and amazing temples standing in the desert on the edges of the Nile valley in Upper Egypt. These appeared to be the remains of a mysterious civilization that had preceded the ancient Greeks, and in exploring these ruins the expedition would be seeking to discover the lost origins of Western civilization.

Each morning Napoleon would decide upon a question for discussion that evening between himself, the senior savants and the generals traveling with him aboard
L’Orient
. Seated around a table, their faces dimly illuminated by lanterns, this collection of young ambitious soldiers and brilliant minds would discuss their leader’s chosen topics. These included “Is there life on other planets?,” “How will the world end?” and “How old is the earth?” (Ironically, the findings of the expedition would completely transform all previous knowledge of this latter subject.)

Amongst those who played a leading role in these nightly debates were the mathematician Gaspard Monge, the inventor of descriptive geometry; the chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet, who discovered the foundations of chemical reaction; the portly Italian engineer General Louis Caffarelli, who had a wooden leg and was the most popular general with the soldiers; Napoleon’s young friend and aide Andoche Junot; and of course Napoleon himself, who in this intellectual forum insisted upon being heard as an equal, though in practice his voice stilled all others.

The debates would continue beneath the vast dome of the starlit heavens, as the ghostly looming canvases of the sails above them filled and slackened in the breeze.
⁵
From the darkness all around came the shush of the passing waves and the creaking of the ship’s timbers as it shifted in the swell. The officer on the bridge would ring the bell to mark the passing of the watch, calling to the lookouts, their distant voices replying from the prow and from the crow’s nest high in the darkness of the masts.

Occasionally Napoleon and his assembled staff and savants would listen to readings from various classic texts, which in turn would inspire their own topics for discussion. A reading from the Bible describing Joseph’s dream provoked a debate on whether dreams had meanings that could be interpreted. And after hearing a passage from Rousseau’s
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
, there followed a debate lasting three nights on the social advantages and disadvantages of property. The spirit of the Revolution lived on, even amongst the generals: despite the setbacks of Robespierre’s Terror and the evident corruption of the current Directory, the shipboard debaters felt free to propose all manner of idealistic questions. Nothing was sacred—even property. Inspired by Rousseau’s stirring words, Caffarelli declared: “I maintain that the laws which sanctify property sanctify usurpation and theft.” He even went so far as to propose a form of communism to replace the laws of property. The savant Regnault demanded to know how a society could possibly function without such laws. The following evening Caffarelli pulled from the breast pocket of his uniform the speech he had prepared in reply to Regnault. As he paced back and forth, his wooden leg knocking hollowly against the planks of the deck, he outlined his solution. With regard to property, society would be divided into two classes: there would be those who owned property, and their tenants, who would be the future owners. After twenty years of working for the profit of the owners, the tenants would in their turn become the owners of the property, and would take on their own tenants. This unique system would thus exist in perpetuity.

As the invasion fleet sailed east across the Mediterranean, Napoleon would lie in bed reading and dictating to Bourrienne. His principal reading was from the Koran. Like Alexander the Great before him, he intended to absorb the religion of the people over whom he would rule. He insisted that, if necessary, he himself was willing to become a Muslim—an intention that, at least initially, he would show every sign of wishing to fulfill. However, it should also be noted that in Napoleon’s shipboard library the Koran was shelved under “Politics.” At the same time, he also busied himself with dictating his “proclamation” to the Egyptian people.

In the name of Allah the merciful . . . People of Egypt, you will have been told that I come as an enemy of Islam. This is a lie . . . I have come to restore your rights and punish those who oppress you. . . . I worship God more than your oppressors; I respect Mohammed his prophet and the holy Koran. . . .The French are also true Moslems. The proof of this can be seen in the fact that they have marched against Rome and destroyed the throne of the Pope, who constantly incited the Christians to make war on all Moslems . . .
⁶

Prior to arrival, this proclamation would be translated into Arabic by one of the Orientalists amongst the savants and printed on the Arabic printing press which Napoleon was carrying on board
L’Orient.
(He had scoured Europe for an Arabic printing press; ironically, the only one he had managed to find was at the Papal Propaganda Office in Rome.) On arrival, he intended that his proclamation should be distributed amongst the Egyptians, and it was hoped that this would overcome the need for armed conflict. Such was to be the first step in the creation of his Oriental empire. As Napoleon later put it, when describing his feelings at this time: “I saw the way to achieve all my dreams. . . . I would found a religion, I saw myself marching on the way to Asia, mounted on an elephant, a turban on my head, and in my hand a new Koran that I would have composed to suit my needs. In my enterprises I would have combined the experiences of the two worlds, exploiting the realm of all history for my own profit.”
⁷

On June 30, 1798, six weeks after setting out from Toulon, the French fleet approached the shore of Egypt. In the third century
BC
the Pharos of Alexandria, the 400-foot lighthouse that had been one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, could be seen on a clear day from thirty-five miles out to sea, and on a clear night the radiance of its mirror-aided light was reputed to have been visible from below the horizon for up to eighty miles. But this wonder had long since crumbled into the harbor. As the leading ships of Napoleon’s armada approached land, all that could now be seen was a smudge on the horizon of the flat African coastline, with the solitary ruin known as Pompey’s Pillar forming the landmark for the once great city of Alexandria.

I

The Origins of the Egyptian Campaign

S
INCE
earliest times, Egypt had been a source of wonder to the European eye. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus, visiting the country in the mid fifth century
BC
, encountered the following scene: “During the flooding of the Nile only the towns are visible, rising above the surface of the water like the scattered islands of the Aegean Sea. While the inundation continues, boats no longer keep to the channels and rivers, but sail across the fields and plains. On a journey far inland you can even sail past the pyramids.”
¹
Less than two centuries later, the Macedonian Greek Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, completing this task in a matter of months, but remaining long enough to found the city of Alexandria, whose site he selected in 331
BC
at what was then the western mouth of the Nile delta. After this, in what appeared to be a characteristic act of hubris, but was in fact an attempt to win over the local priesthood, Alexander sacrificed to the sacred bull Apis and had himself crowned pharaoh. He then set off east on his campaign of conquest against the Persians, during which he planted the seeds of Greek culture across a great swath of Asia. Eight years later, having extended his conquests to the limits of the known world, Alexander died after a drinking bout in Babylon, and his body was brought back to Alexandria to be buried in a magnificent tomb, made of gold and glass, whose site has since been lost.

In Roman times, Egypt would become the granary of the Mediterranean world, providing over a third of the grain supplies for the entire Roman Empire. During the first century
BC
Alexandria would become the focus of stirring events which changed the fate of that empire, when the charms of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, proved irresistible first to Julius Caesar and then to Mark Antony, while rivalry between these two ambitious men plunged the Roman Empire into civil war.

Under the Greeks, and then the Romans, Alexandria would become the intellectual capital of the Western world, the city that produced Euclid and educated Archimedes, its celebrated library a respository of all knowledge. It was here that Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth and its distance from the sun. For the latter, he used the known fact that on a certain day the sun could be seen at the foot of a deep well in Aswan 500 miles to the south, and was thus directly overhead. He then measured the length of the shadow cast by a pole in Alexandria, and thus the angle of the sun’s rays there; using trigonometry, he then calculated the distance of the sun within around 5 percent of the accepted modern figure. Such was the reach and achievement of Alexandrian learning at its prime. When its library burned down in two disastrous fires, the last of which was started by zealot Christians in
AD
391, the ancient world lost over half a million scrolls, and with these as much as a quarter of the knowledge and cultural heritage of Western civilization vanished forever.